Stylesetter Lorry Newhouse (wearing a dress she created for her eponymous fashion line and jewelry by David Webb) stands in the Manhattan apartment she shares with her husband, Mark Newhouse, a publishing executive; the duplex was decorated in collaboration with Rain Phillips.

Stylesetter Lorry Newhouse (wearing a dress she created for her eponymous fashion line and jewelry by David Webb) stands in the Manhattan apartment she shares with her husband, Mark Newhouse, a publishing executive; the duplex was decorated in collaboration with Rain Phillips.

Stylesetter Lorry Newhouse (wearing a dress she created for her eponymous fashion line and jewelry by David Webb) stands in the Manhattan apartment she shares with her husband, Mark Newhouse, a publishing executive; the duplex was decorated in collaboration with Rain Phillips.

This article originally appeared in the September 2013 issue of Architectural Digest.

Perched at the top of a stately 1920s building by architect Rosario Candela, the Manhattan penthouse of philanthropist and fashion designer Lorry Newhouse has all the whimsy of a garden folly on a baronial estate. The moment one steps into the entrance hall—where a grand mahogany sideboard, a homey hooked rug, and baroque double doors make unexpected companions—one is overcome by a world where past meets present, high meets low, and town meets country.

Newhouse and her husband, Mark—an executive with Advance Publications, which is owned by his family (and is the parent company of Condé Nast, publisher of AD)—purchased the Park Avenue duplex in 1993, after their children, Jesse and Charlotte, had taken off for boarding school. To furnish it they brought many belongings from their British-style manor house in Summit, New Jersey, including 19th-century treasures they had collected during numerous trips to the English countryside. “I went antiques shopping while Mark fished,” Newhouse explains.

The gilt-wood pier glass that looms at one end of the dining room, the Victorian slipper chairs that seem to show up everywhere, and the curious bamboo upright piano that stands in a pollen-yellow corridor are just a few of the spoils of her various expeditions. A similarly unorthodox mix of textures, epochs, patterns, and colors is seen in the vintage-inspired women’s clothing line Newhouse launched in 2011 with Julia Flynn, her creative director. Their designs have been worn by stylish personalities such as writer Amy Fine Collins, actress Laura Linney, and fashion-and-art curator Stacy Engman.

Over the two decades she and Mark have spent in the apartment, Newhouse has adhered to a playful Proustian philosophy of decoration she sums up as “what was wonderful when I was growing up.” Raised in Connecticut, the daughter of a pianist mother and an engineer-artist father, she recalls being highly influenced by the home of local painter Madeleine Sharrer. “She had all of these textiles layered on top of her sofas, and tattered antique rugs,” says Newhouse, who as a teenager spent Sunday afternoons taking art lessons with Sharrer. Her aesthetic education continued at Yale, where she majored in film and later earned an MFA.

While Newhouse relied on her own well-trained eye to decorate the apartment, she consulted with interior designer Rain Phillips. And she had a little help from Rose Cumming. Once upon a time the apartment had been a project of the legendary Manhattan designer and antiques dealer, who was known for fancifully louche interiors. Newhouse kept as many Cumming touches as she could—among them the hand-painted Italian doors that open to the living and dining rooms. She chose a Rose Cumming trellis wallpaper to cover the ceiling and upper walls of the kitchen; with its black AGA stove and filmy dotted-swiss curtains, the room seems plucked from an English cottage.

An antique Baccarat chandelier from Regency Home overlooks the living room, where the sheer curtains are made from a Christopher Hyland silk gauze. The black-lacquer mirrors are antique, the sofa is upholstered in a Rubelli fabric, and the needlepoint carpet in the foreground is by Stark.

To her regret Newhouse couldn't salvage the Fortuny fabric Cumming had used to upholster the living room walls because it had become too threadbare (she did, however, repurpose a fragment of the material in a self-portrait). The space is now painted an elusive neutral that hovers between almond and dusty rose. Beneath the room’s chair rail is a William Morris–style wallpaper splashed with flowering vines that complements an assortment of Arts and Crafts ceramics.

In the staircase leading to the second floor, where Newhouse has her atelier, a 1920s hooked runner bearing bucolic imagery ascends past arrangements of early-20th-century fashion illustrations by Georges Lepape and Carl Erickson grouped with paintings of single-cell organisms by artist Robert Hawkins. Equally unlikely juxtapositions are found in the scarlet-walled smoking room, where 19th-century hunting prints meet contemporary paintings by David Bowes and George Condo. Even sentimental works of art find a place in the apartment. Beside the canopy bed in the turquoise master suite hangs a shadow box of origami roses, a Mother’s Day gift made several years ago by Newhouse’s son.

The atelier, a large salmon-pink sitting room adjacent to a terrace with breathtaking city views, is lit by mid-20th-century Vallauris ceramic lamps. This is where Newhouse does the creative work on her line, which is sold at select boutiques from Seattle to Palm Beach, Florida, and on her website. The looks range from impeccable metallic-tweed suits to a diaphanous silk dress with a Peter Pan collar and accordion-pleated skirt. “Pair it with a black bra and black lace leggings and you’re instantly sexy,” says Newhouse, who is a member of Vanity Fair’s International Best-Dressed List.

Newhouse’s decor, art, and fashion are as tightly interwoven as the lush fabrics she favors. Her spring 2014 ready-to-wear collection, like her bed canopy and the carpets, is dominated by floral motifs. Even the iron chandelier in the atelier is a riot of flowers, ornamented with beaded blossoms. And mounted high on one of the room’s walls, like a frieze, are four of Newhouse’s drawings, based on film footage of her running on a beach as a child. In Newhouse’s world the past is never forgotten. Instead it blooms over and over again, endlessly re-created and resurrected.

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